Castle of Water: A Novel(26)
20
Generally speaking, the South Pacific has never been especially prone to hurricanes—or cyclones, as they’re known in that corner of the globe. But when they do come whirling through the neighborhood, they tend to be inordinately destructive. Tahiti, for example, has no official hurricane season to speak of. But that didn’t deter six separate cyclones from hitting the islands in a single year between 1982 and 1983. The storms walloped French Polynesia in rapid succession, leaving entire towns and villages leveled in their wake. Similar destruction visited the South Pacific in the early 1990s as well, when another lethal spate of cyclones swept through the region. Why these periodic bursts of ferocious hurricane activity? El Ni?o. The most innocuous sounding of meteorologic phenomenon, an old weatherman’s trick for explaining a wet forecast. But while that slipstream of warm equatorial water gives most of the Western Hemisphere nothing more than a few spring showers, it has a tendency to wreak havoc in the southern portion of Polynesia. And as it just so happened, 2002 turned out to be an El Ni?o year.
Now, Barry Bleecker was certainly no stranger to storms. He was on the sort of intimate terms with them unique to young men born in America’s middle. He had come to know them very well in the rush of oak-knocking wind that always announced a tornado’s arrival. The tone of the Emergency Broadcast System was never far behind, but Barry’s nose, finely calibrated over the course of a boyhood of such storms, could smell them coming from a mile away. In fact, they haunted his dreams still. His one and only recurring nightmare was of being back on his family’s farm in Macoupin County, Illinois, exposed and vulnerable in a cornfield and watching the dragon claws of a twister descend from the clouds. True, Barry had never actually seen a tornado firsthand—they always seemed to strike just a suburb away or one town over. But he had spent his childhood in their barometric shadow, and the storms that spawned them cut through his thin Presbyterian veneer and shook him down to his Baptist soul.
Which was why Barry knew something was seriously amiss long before there was any obvious sign. His nose had been twitching all morning. The disquieting stillness, the conspiracy of pressures, an electrical tang in the very molecules of the air—it was all too familiar. When the ragged edges of the sky took on an almost phosphorescent glow, it only made him that much more sure of it. Had he been in Illinois, his grandparents might have taken him to the root cellar. Had the feeling presented itself in Ohio, there was always the security of the cinder-block basement. But there was nothing beneath them on the island but sand, and precious little shelter from the whims of the sea.
“Why do you keep doing that?” Sophie finally asked in annoyance.
“Doing what?”
“Raising your head and sniffing, like some kind of dog.”
Barry didn’t answer for a moment. He set down the banana peel he’d been scraping out with a clamshell and took a squinting survey of the horizon. “I’m not sure. But I think something’s not right.”
“We’ve been on this shitty island for almost a year now and you just figured that out?”
“No, seriously, I mean it.” He stood up just in time to catch an unusually cool breeze, sending a familiar wave of goose bumps rippling across his bare skin.
Sophie set aside her banana peels as well and conducted her own scan of the horizon.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It looks normal to me. A little overcast, but it’s like this all the time during the rainy season.”
“The rainy season should be almost over. This feels different.”
Sophie rolled her eyes theatrically in Barry’s direction. “So we’re going off feelings now? Is that it?”
“Just turn on the radio. Maybe we can get something from Tahiti.”
“Turn it on yourself, imbécile.”
Normally, Barry would have responded with an insult, possibly even a cruel mimicry of her French accent, but on this day, he did not. Instead, he fetched the radio from the bag of survival gear in their shelter, gave it a minute’s worth of cranks, and spent another finding the station. There was considerable interference, which was unusual. Some of it almost sounded like conversation, a low burble of background noise clotting up the airwaves. But the signal from Tahiti at last came warbling through the static, in French, of course, and Barry asked Sophie to listen. She did so, reluctantly.
“It’s just some bulletin about the mayor of Papeete going fishing with a church group. And something about a quilting contest.”
“Keep listening.”
“Pfff.” She expressed her aggravation in the usual fashion but did keep her ear cocked toward the shortwave. Slowly, her eyes began to narrow.
“Anything?”
“Shhhh!” Evidently, there was.
The broadcast ended shortly thereafter, at which point Sophie clicked off the radio.
“Well?”
“Comment dit-on ‘cyclone’ en anglais?”
“Cyclone. It’s the same word. Or hurricane.”
“Alors, the man said a big one is moving to the north and west of Tahiti, but it is not supposed to hit any islands, and should not be a threat. You see? No big deal.”
“Not a big deal to anyone on Tahiti, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“We’re not on Tahiti.”